Well, I am here in Long Island attending graduate school. For this blog, I try to gather marine and environmental related news and post them here, and add my two cents where I deem appropriate. Enjoy!

Friday, August 11, 2006

Typhoon Saomai

Typhoon Saomai formed in the western Pacific on August 4, 2006, as a tropical depression. Within a day, it had become organized enough to be classified as a tropical storm and earn a name: Saomai, which is the Vietnamese name for the planet Venus. The storm continued to gather strength, becoming a typhoon on August 6. As of August 10, it was poised to strike mainland China as a Category 4 super typhoon, making it the eighth storm to come ashore in China in 2006, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

This photo-like image was acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Aqua satellite on August 10, 2006, at 1:05 p.m. local time (05:05 UTC). Typhoon Saomai possessed a well-defined, closed (cloud-filled) eye at the center of the storm, with tightly wound spiral arms. Thunderstorm systems particularly close to the eyewall were sending up tall cloud towers, which cast shadows onto the surrounding lower clouds (see large, full-resolution image). Around the time MODIS captured this image, Typhoon Saomai had sustained winds of around 240 kilometers per hour (150 miles per hour), according to the University of Hawaii’s Tropical Storm Information Center.

The high-resolution image provided above is provided at the full MODIS spatial resolution (level of detail) of 250 meters per pixel. The MODIS Rapid Response System provides this image at additional resolutions.

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About Me

I am a marine biologist that is currently attending graduate school at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, Marine Sciences Research Center, of Stony Brook University, New York. I am very interested in marine ecology and have been focusing my studies on bay scallop interactions with their habitats. I plan to investigate various anthropogenic impacts on bay scallop populations for my PhD dissertation. This blog will highlight the details of my graduate research, from bay scallop-eelgrass interactions as previously mentioned, to alternative habitats for scallops, such as Codium, to trophic cascades, and more. Enjoy!